Joyful Stockton man reunited with ashes of dead mother

Ron Malloy's mother has been dead since 2009, but on Wednesday, they had a joyful reunion anyway. Her stolen ashes turned up - in a UPS drop box, of all places.

Michael Fitzgerald

Ron Malloy's mother has been dead since 2009, but on Wednesday, they had a joyful reunion anyway. Her stolen ashes turned up - in a UPS drop box, of all places.

I reported this week that the ashes of Dr. Francis Riggs were stolen from the trunk of a Honda belonging to Malloy in the late hours of Jan. 2 or 3.

Malloy pleaded for anyone who found the ashes to return them. That brought a phone call from Lorraine Esquibel of United Parcel Service.

"We have the remains of Francis Riggs here at the Stockton UPS," she said. "They were in one of our drop boxes. Someone dropped them in there."

I rushed over to the UPS center in east Stockton. There on Esquibel's desk sat the peripatetic Dr. Riggs: the latest stop on her detour.

"The remains were found in a drop box on Robinhood (Drive)," Esquibel said. A driver found them while doing pickups on is route. "He opened the box, and there she was."

The driver didn't know what to do - can't blame him - so he brought the ashes back to headquarters. A supervisor told Esquibel to find out where they belonged.

Nobody at UPS saw the column. But the box bore the name of a Mother Lode cemetery - Riggs, a longtime Stockton pediatrician, retired to Jackson and died there - so Esquibel called it.

I had contacted an affiliated mortuary. The cemetery told Esquibel to call me.

"This is very sad," Esquibel said of the theft. "Gosh, how disrespectful. Who would do that?"

A lowlife auto burglar, Ms. Esquibel. One who presumably realized, soon after heisting the contents of Malloy's car, that the white box contained nothing he could use. And who dropped it unceremoniously into a UPS drop box as discrete a way to get rid of it.

People drop unusual items into UPS boxes all the time, Esquibel said. Though not this unusual.

"This is the first," she said.

I called Malloy, who was despondent and guilt-ridden over losing the ashes. I asked him if he'd like them back.

"You're kidding," he blurted. "You're kidding me. Yes I would. Oh, my God. I can't believe it. This is just unbelievable. I'm just shocked. That's just - wow. What can I say? Thank you. Yes, I do."

With the good doctor riding in my passenger seat, I drove to Malloy's apartment for the mother and child reunion.

"This is just amazing," Malloy said. "This is what I would call a miracle. Miracles happen."

He thanked UPS for being responsible and humane. "Bless them for doing that."

Malloy also vowed to get on with scattering his mother's ashes in the Sierra without further ado - "to scatter them where her heart was," as he put it - as procrastination has unforeseen consequences.